Baker :Buzz

The Los Angeles Times spotlighted Denver's Laundry Truck in a feature that called the aid to homelss people "simple and innovative."

An excerpt:

“You need 13,000 watts running through the truck to make it work,” said Tim Reinen, executive director of Radian Inc., a nonprofit design group that worked with Bayaud on the truck. “Then you have six dryers operating simultaneously at 120 degrees heated by propane.”

And an 800-pound generator mounted underneath.

After several redesigns and $90,000 in donations, the truck hit the streets in April. Denver Water, a city utility, lets it hook up to fire hydrants for water and provides a meter to measure how much it uses. Since then the truck has washed 660 loads, or about 10,000 pounds of laundry."

Don't be fooled by the case of pies in the front window. As you enter the diner in downtown Denver at 8 p.m. on a Friday, the gold booths, open kitchen, and chicken 'n' waffles are only a teaser for the adult playground ahead. The thump of Ol' Dirty Bastard lures you through to Punch Bowl Social's cavernous main hall, 23,000 square feet of fun. At its center is a circular bar lit by a massive antler chandelier, where bushy-bearded, tattooed bartenders serve local brews, craft cocktails, and elder-flower-spiked punch to a crowd of hipster parents and their heirs apparent. Drink in hand, it's time to choose your own adventure. A couple of rounds of bowling, perhaps, in one of eight dimly lit lanes adorned with vintage fox-hunting prints? A private karaoke room? A game of bocce? You wander upstairs, where there's another bar, dozens of 1980s arcade games, Ping-Pong and pool tables, and low banquettes that, as the night wears on, become the backdrop for more sloppy public making out than you've encountered anywhere else in post-collegiate life.

While this scene might not be everyone's idea of a good time, anyone trying to sell to the elusive, highly sought-after 20- and 30-somethings marketers love to refer to as Millennials will want to take notes. Every detail a guest sees, hears, tastes, and experiences at Punch Bowl is part of a well-honed formula for fun engineered by weathered restaurant vet Robert Thompson.

Thompson, who sports a shaved head and an expression that reliably hovers between a squint and a scowl, is hardly a poster boy for the type of carefree good times he's spent his career designing for others. "I can't have fun when I'm here," concedes Thompson, who would rather stay home with his wife and two young sons on Friday night than soak up the endorphins at one of his eight Punch Bowl locations scattered in cities throughout the country. "All I see are the cigarette butts in the parking lot," he nitpicks. "I notice when booths aren't perfectly aligned with light fixtures, if the music levels aren't right for the time of day, whether the hostess ran over to open the door, if the servers are smiling."

Since legalization of cannabis in Denver, Colorado, the urban landscape has experienced a surge of marijuana enthusiasts and medical refugees alike looking to make a home in the Mile High City. Abandoned properties once stuck motionless in a state of decay have been revived by grow operations and newly legal businesses. What was once derelict has been brought back to life, breathing energy into the city streets.

Taking part in a cultural revolution can cause one to work up an appetite, so as one of those marijuana enthusiasts new to Denver, you might be asking yourself, "Where are the best places to eat while stoned?"

Well, we're here to help you find the best munchie fixes in the city with expert recommendations from a top cannabis chef, complete with pairing tips for primo pot strains -- so get ready to blaze before stepping foot into one of these fine establishments!

The system opened two new rail lines this year -- one to the city's airport and one to northern suburbs -- both operated under contract by private company Denver Transit Partners LLC. Two more lines are scheduled to open by the end of 2016.

Financially, RTD is "basically doing everything right," said Jeff Brown, who researches public-transit system finances and is chairman of Florida State University's Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

Still, in 2013 the RTD spent the most in capital costs per passenger ride among the nation's 15 largest transit agencies, due to the cost of its buildout. And it isn't immune from economic concerns.

Denver ranked on the list high due to its parks, proximity to the Rockies, transit, music and beer -- plus legal marijuana.

Excerpt:

Denver is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, boasting 83,000 new residents since 2010. Educated millennials lead the charge, drawn to Denver's cool music scene, dozens of breweries, public transportation network -- including bike share -- and, in some cases, the legalization of marijuana in Colorado.

The British newspaper peered into the city in a travel feature and came away with an appreciation for its beer, art and most everything else.

Excerpt:

The first permanent building in Denver wasn’t a church, a home or a bank; it was a saloon. Now, more than 150 years after gold prospectors first began to arrive, Denverites still clearly love their beer.

. . .

Simply strolling or cycling around the city (Denverites love bikes as much as they love beer) gives you an idea of the remarkable amount of choice here for hop-heads. There’s a German brewery (Prost Brewing Company), an English brewery (Hogshead), a hippy brewery (Vine Street Pub & Brewery), and even a heavy metal brewery (TRVE Brewing Company). For the truly thirsty, you can seamlessly link many of the best establishments together, on foot or bike, via the popular Denver Beer Trail, with free downloadable maps. The Denver Beer Fest, a nine-day gala of local brews held in the autumn, is an enjoyable way to tap into the scene, and the Great American Beer Festival, following swiftly behind, showcases more than 3,000 beers from across the USA at Denver’s Colorado Convention Center.

But it's not all about pints and pitchers: Denver as a whole is very much on the up. The second fastest growing city in the country after Austin, it’s also chasing down the Texan capital in the cool stakes too. A magnet for young professionals, the active and outdoorsy, it’s one of the youngest cities in the US too, with a median population age of just 34.

James and Sarah Howat began fermenting the first Black Project beer in February 2014 in a back room at Former Future, the Denver brewery they were preparing to launch. Both breweries have found success, but Black Project stayed under classified status for a while.The husband-and-wife duo didn’t even tell most Former Future employees what was happening in that room; it remained an Area 51 until eight months later. Once the first Black Project beer was released, the floodgates opened. Geeks clamored for the sour and funky brews, all made with native, wild microflora (the Howats don’t purchase any yeast for Black Project beers from a lab).

Before this year, there weren't many spots in Denver where an unemployed person could get help stepping back into the job stream. A small cluster of employment service centers were huddled in the heart of the city, but most of its 11 districts were largely unserved.

Now that the Office of Economic Development (OED) has decided to divide Denver's job training programs out to private contractors, the number of government-funded work and economic assistance centers will jump seven-fold, going from seven to nearly 50 and spanning across all 11 districts instead of only five.

"People can access these services where they're comfortable instead of traveling [into downtown]," says Denise Bryant, director of the OED's workforce development program. "We have contractors and subcontractors that are now actually in the community."

The point is simple: "Session beer" as an idea continues to be embraced and grow, but it still has plenty of room to diversify itself in the minds of beer drinkers and the lineups of breweries.

In Denver, and at Sesh Fest, this thankfully does seem to be happening, at least to a degree. In the Mile-High City, one would think the physical effects of altitude might naturally lead to a more robust appreciation for camping and hiking-friendly low-ABV beer styles, and this is at least partially the case, according to a few brewers I spoke with at the event. It was an unusually smooth, easygoing beer festival, and it would be hard to deny that the concept isn't great, as a session beer fest can simultaneously encourage eclectic sampling and relative moderation. Eric Nichols, the head brewer at Beryl's Beer Co. in Denver's beer-rich River North neighborhood, said the event was indicative of the session beer culture that has grown in the city during the two years that Beryl has been in operation.

"I think if you live here, more than the altitude, it's the active lifestyles you tend to find in Colorado that are driving session beer here," Nichols said. "Most people here aren't drinking to get blitzed, and they're very outdoor-focused. Session styles are perfect to incorporate into that."

When choosing a name for his heavy metal-inspired, Denver-based brewing company, proprietor Nick Nunns chose TRVE (pronounced "true"), an inside joke in the metal-community poking fun at people who take themselves too seriously. When choosing an artist, Sam Turner was a no-brainer. "He's had a long history of doing work for heavy metal bands and, as such, he was the perfect person to collaborate with for our design aesthetic," says Nunns. "From day one, he's designed amazing labels for us that could easily be mistaken for album covers."

The New York Times looked at what's luring millennials to Denver, including openness, bars, transit and weed.

Excerpt:

The youthful party continues on many nights around the renovated Union Station in the trendy Lower Downtown district, known locally as LoDo, and along Larimer Street in River North, or RiNo. It was unclear on a recent evening whether there were more bars than signs supporting Bernie Sanders, but both were plentiful. Scruffy Murphy's Irish Pub, Los Chingones' rooftop bar and the Wynkoop Brewing Company (one of 65 microbreweries here, according to the Colorado Brewers Guild) were all doing a brisk business.

As for the Vermont senator, so popular with millennials, he was depicted on a two-story painted wall mural -- like something you'd see in Los Angeles or Belfast celebrating heroes -- with a fist raised and the slogan "Rise Together!"

This is also an apt slogan for this city, which has risen from economic stagnation and urban irrelevance to become a millennial magnet.

For example, in Denver in the late 1990s, voters rejected a plan. Later, they approved a sales tax for light rail. That was only after advocates spoke to tens of thousands of residents, and found pockets of support among young professionals and, surprisingly, retirees.

"One of the biggest pockets of support were retired women over the age of 65, because they saw it as the first opportunity for them to come back into downtown and see a show at the performing arts center and have lunch together with the girls," said Kathleen Osher with Denver's Transit Alliance.

A decade ago, travelers arriving at Denver's sprawling new airport would look out over a vast expanse of flat, prairie dog-infested grassland and wonder if their plane had somehow fallen short of its destination. The $4.9 billion airport -- at 53 square miles, larger than Manhattan -- was derided as being "halfway to Kansas," and given the emptiness of the 23-mile drive to the city, it felt that way.

Last month, arriving visitors boarded the first trains headed for downtown, a journey that zips past a new Japanese-style "smart city" emerging from the prairie before depositing passengers 37 minutes later in a bustling urban hive of restaurants, shops and residential towers that only six years ago was a gravelly no man's land -- an entire $2 billion downtown neighborhood that's mushroomed up around the hub of Denver's rapidly expanding light rail system.

The 22.8-mile spur from the airport to downtown is the latest addition to a regional rail system that has transformed Denver and its suburbs. Using an unprecedented public-private partnership that combines private funding, local tax dollars and federal grants, Denver has done something no other major metro area has accomplished in the past decade, though a number of cities have tried. At a moment when aging mass transit systems in several major cities are capturing headlines for mismanagement, chronic delays and even deaths, Denver is unveiling a shiny new and widely praised network: 68 stations along 10 different spurs, covering 98 miles, with another 15 miles still to come. Even before the new lines opened, 77,000 people were riding light rail each day, making it the eighth-largest system in the country even though Denver is not in the top 20 cities for population. The effects on the region's quality of life have been measurable and also surprising, even to the project's most committed advocates. Originally intended to unclog congested highways and defeat a stubborn brown smog that was as unhealthy as it was ugly, the new rail system has proven that its greatest value is the remarkable changes in land use its stations have prompted, from revitalizing moribund neighborhoods, like the area around Union Station, to creating new communities where once there was only sprawl or buffalo grass.

The Charlotte Observer ran a story focused on regional collaboration that painted Denver as a transit model for other cities.

Excerpt:

The Denver area has a long history of regionalism, in part due to necessity: The region makes up a majority of the state's population and tax receipts, so there's no other game in town, so to speak. The transit system has been run by a regional entity that covers multiple counties since its inception.

But that doesn't mean cooperation has always come easily. In 1997, the first attempt at a ballot measure for a regional sales tax increase to pay for an expanded system went down 57 to 43 percent.

"People say, did you all wake up one morning and decide to cooperate? We didn't," said Maria Garcia Berry of CRL Associates, a public policy firm that helped craft the successful 2004 ballot campaign.